Immigrant workers say future in limbo as government ranking system scores soar

Kanika Maheshwari moved to Brampton from India in 2020 to study business management. Her dream, she says, was to open a jewelry business one day.

Since graduating, she has been working with a logistics company as a sales executive. The 29-year-old has built a life in Canada with her husband, who works as a trader — both are saving to open her jewelry store. 

But Maheshwari says her dream is now at risk because her Canadian work permit expires in August, and she hasn't heard back about her permanent residency (PR) application since she applied last year, due to Comprehensive Ranking System (CRS) draws which have been consistently way higher than her score.

One immigration consultant says that is because a record number of people are applying for a PR with higher scores, having collected more points through lengthy and costly application processes that come with no guarantee of success. 

Canada accepted a record high of 430,000 PR applications in 2022. 

"It feels like I'm going straight and there will be a well where I will fall down," Maheshwari says. 

CRS is a ranking system used by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to score immigrants applying for a permanent residency, using factors like age, level of education, English proficiency and work experience. Every two weeks, IRCC draws a CRS rank and applicants with that score or higher are invited to submit documents to receive a PR card. 

All the draws since January this year for the general category have averaged over 540, according to IRCC's website.

"That's terribly high. It's impossible to meet, and it's really rare," says Manan Gupta, a Brampton immigration consultant.

Most people with a post-graduate work permit (PGWP) — lasting a maximum of three years — don't meet the current threshold, Gupta says. 

That high score comes at a time when Immigration Minister Marc Miller says permits expiring after 2023 will not be extended, as the ministry decided to end the temporary extension program introduced during the pandemic in 2020 to retain students as workers. Miller made the announcement in December.

Gupta says he's worried that will lead to hundreds of thousands of workers exiting the country.

"If these temporary foreign workers suddenly exit the labour market, we don't have people to fill in the same job," he says.

Canada had 286,000 PGWP holders in 2022 — a similar number of those work permits have been issued annually since 2019 — with over half of them intending to work in Ontario, according to IRCC data.